Monday, July 11, 2011

Our previous excursion into online readings was sort of disjointed, sparsely commented, and for the most part not terribly fruitful. There was some good discussion, but I think a combination of format, content, and time constraints added to the difficulty in exploring the Landscape Urbanism Reader to the degree I would have liked to see. Also, the planned weekly updates on chapters never materialized - beyond the first introductory missive on Waldheim's 'A Reference Manifesto'. Nonetheless, we may retool the concept for another book in the future - but in the meantime, I wanted to explore the content, as I took a somewhat more methodical approach to the essays - breaking it down to tease out some key points... including:

Definitions of Landscape Urbanism

Urban Context - what conditions are LU responding to?

Key Urban Concepts that shaped LU?

Representative Projects/Precedents

Key References

Sso in the next couple of weeks I'll post on these chapters, starting with Corner's 'Terra Fluxus', and would love for some comment and discussion to ensue, as these formative essays are some of the most powerful (and misunderstood) in the landscape urbanism discourse. In addition to the essay-by-essay exploration, there seems the need for some more cross-concept analysis (i.e. a focus on precedents, various definitions, etc.) that could be analyzed and displayed in some infographic analyses...

Will probably do a similar thing for some of the other key texts, such as Kerb 15, Topos 71, Center 14: Landscape Urbanism, Large Parks, A Manual for the Machinic Landscape, Stalking Detroit, Recovering Landscape, The Mesh Book, and selected essays from other key texts and sources... (along with continuation of the 'Red Brick Chronicles') - so lots of good stuff that would be great to construct the foundations.